The year began with hope — it was contagious after seeing Tunisians rise up and send the tyrant Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fleeing the presidential palace for exile in Saudi Arabia. Next came Egypt, where the awe-inspiring resolve of millions of Egyptians not to yield Tahrir Square to the regime’s security forces and thugs led to the removal of President Hosni Mubarak.
However, nations of people rising up for the freedom to claim their own destiny was a veneer that became sullied shortly after the beginning of the Libyan revolution. As the NATO bombing campaign ramped up and global powers began jockeying for position in anticipation of the post-Qadhafi era, the work of foreign hands pulling strings in Arab affairs again became apparent.
Given the strategic importance of Bahrain to Western powers, the Saudi decision to invade and crush the uprising there could not have been made in a vacuum; Ali Abdullah Saleh’s dubious cooperation with the West against Al Qaeda led to the continued support for his regime, long after its brutality against protesters was exposed, while Syria, at the crossroads of a myriad of Middle Eastern conflicts, is a veritable playground for foreign interference from every direction.
But look around the world in 2011 and it is no longer clear that the global powers know what they are doing anymore. Currencies and economies are crumbling everywhere while mass public protests have taken hold throughout much of the West. There would seem to be a fundamental reordering of the global geopolitical and economic structures taking place, and with so many moving parts, where the world will settle in five years is beyond any plausible guess.
What is certain is only uncertainty. And, almost ironically, there are few people more schooled at adapting to, and thriving in, instability than the Lebanese — when the sky is falling, who else would think to begin exporting umbrellas?
Whatever the future of the uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, however, and no matter how foreign influence contorts the counter revolutions, the one thing the Arabs have taken back in 2011, what will not be easily stolen again, is their pride.
